ALEXANDRIA, Va., April 9 -- United States Patent no. 12,271,992, issued on April 8, was assigned to GOOGLE LLC (Mountain View, Calif.).
"Hybrid depth maps" was invented by Eric Turner (Somerville, Mass.), Adarsh Prakash Murthy Kowdle (San Francisco), Bicheng Luo (Sunnyvale, Calif.) and Juan David Hincapie Ramos (Palo Alto, Calif.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method including receiving (S605) a request for a depth map, generating (S625) a hybrid depth map based on a device depth map (110) and downloaded depth information (105), and responding (S630) to the request for the depth map with the hybrid depth map (415). The device depth map (110) can be depth data captured on a user device (515)...